Movie review: "Frost/Nixon", and who is worse?

A fascinating partial rehabilitation of Richard Nixon (the man, at least), "Frost/Nixon" will undoubtedly garner an impressive number of Oscar nominations and make most critics' "Best of 2008" lists, and for good reason. For a movie concerned only with a series of interviews (and the history of how they were organized), the 2 hours+ speeds by unnoticed in the least, because the portraits drawn of these two men and their business partners quickly draw you into their respective worlds, by turns humorous (yes, even Tricky Dick gets some funny lines) and pathetic. One gets the distinct impression that Ron Howard is working at the top of his game with this impressive material, and the performances he captures are riveting. This is a seamless movie from beginning to end--which one expects from Howard, a polished filmmaker for decades now--but more impressively, "Frost/Nixon" is an emotionally (again, expected of Howard) and intellectually (not often a Howard interest) engaging piece of work.
How bad a person was Richard Nixon? is the question with which one leaves the theatre, and it is a fair one--even from this movie the audience can see how bad a President he was. Most snobbish cinephiles will probably chalk up any sympathy one feels for Nixon to Howard's penchant for over-romanticizing his subjects, but I think in this case Howard gets it absolutely right. Nixon the man was intelligent and self-aware, and at heart loved his family, friends, and the country. He was a hateful politician, and as paranoid as the day is long, but in the end he was lost outside the political realm in which he relished living.
Nixon's story is a classic Greek tragedy, because his hubris earned both his rise to prominence and his downfall. We see glimpses of both in the one vignette presented to us in "Frost/Nixon", as Nixon's brains and ruthless tactics carry him to "victory" for most of the interviews, but by the end his inner near-pathological sense of his own worthlessness unravels him in dramatic fashion, finally, brutally, exposed under the lights of a television set. Nixon the President shows up only then in full, and our understanding of Nixon the man thereby grows a bit deeper.
Immediately upon leaving the theatre, my friends and I began discussing what so obviously attracted Howard and perhaps the other participants to "Frost/Nixon" this past year: how do Nixon and Bush compare? What are the parallels here? Some of the lines in the script seem pointed directly to the audience's desire to connect the two men most often cited by those ranking the very worst Presidents in our country's history. Part of the problem we have in finding parallels in the two is that Bush's story has yet to end, although the cynic in me believes not much is going to change after Smirky evacuates the White House on 1/20/09. What we do know, however, is that GWBush is hardly fit to carry Nixon's dog intellectually, and his evident lack of desire to carry out any of the duties of the President (shown most severely by accounts of meetings with his advisers, where even on subjects of grave importance, the word "briefing" carried its original meaning of a drastically shortened summary of a topic) contrasts starkly with Nixon's obsessive attention to the job he prized so highly.
I suppose the real answer, though, lies not in the psychological makeup of each man, but rather in what each man did to deserve his fate. And it is here, I think, that we can see far more easily that Bush has been vastly more sinister than Nixon ever wanted to be. Nixon's crimes, to be honest, were minor infractions of the law compounded hugely by the fact that it was the President of the United States who committed them. (As the script points out repeatedly in "Frost/Nixon", Nixon merely inherited the war in Vietnam, and even though he expanded it beyond that country's borders against Congress's legislative mandate, he also ended the conflict eventually.) While Nixon truly believed that the President was above the law, his actions founded on that belief were restricted to petty acts of revenge against individuals--nothing that J. Edgar Hoover hadn't been already doing for decades previous--or paranoid political gamesmanship--Watergate, naturally. (All Presidents since FDR have bombed countries [and/or authorized overthrows of legitimate governments] we haven't officially declared war against, so the expansion of the war into Cambodia or Laos can be seen as merely a continuation of 20 years of debased Presidential policy.)
The Bush/Cheney Administration, on the other hand, has committed so many un- or anti-Constitutional, let alone immoral (I would say "amoral") and illegal, acts it is mind-numbing to try and recount them all. To start at the top, bald-faced lying about both the reasons we went to war against Iraq and what we hoped to accomplish there, and the underlying "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive warmaking clearly establish this Administration as the most venal the country has yet seen. While the number of overall deaths might--I stress might--be less than were killed in southeast Asia, no one can argue about who started it and who has urged its continuation beyond all reasonable measures. Add to that the defiance of the Geneva Convention's regulations on torture, the refusal to adhere even to our own definitions of justice or law in how we capture and treat prisoners, the blatant disclosures of non-compliance with duly-passed legislation (signing statements), the attempts to bypass Constitutional restraints on Executive power (remember Dick's insistence that the Vice President is in neither the Executive nor the Legislative Branch?) in any capacity, the deterioration or simple elimination of regulatory oversight by such nominally benign agencies such as the FDA, FCC, OSHA, and even the National Science Foundation (remember how its head quit because he was asked to fudge statistics regarding global warming?), and the insistent attempts, since retroactively legalized, to wiretap the entire populace of the country without the Constitutional protection of the 4th Amendment--which I listed just off the top of my head!--and you can see just some of the outlines of the unprecedented destruction this Administration has caused this country, endangering its very existence as a democratic republic. I reviewed his book when it first came out, so I won't go any further but to say that a person as in-the-know as John Dean called it correctly: "Worse Than Watergate".